MLB Team Travel

One interesting aspect of the proposed realignment is the effect it will have on team travel. As Dave Cameron noted without division there would be fewer games between geographically close teams, and more between teams farther way from each other — travel will increase. Last Thursday On the Forecheck, a hockey blog, posted the total distance each NHL team will travel in the upcoming 2011-2012 season (hat tip Tango). That made me think that, in light of realignment, it would be interesting to see how much teams are already traveling — and how much variation is there between teams — as a baseline for the current system.

I wanted to get a broad picture of travel distances for each team under the current system, so rather than use just one year’s worth of data I looked at all seasons from 2005 (when the Montreal Expos became the Washington Nationals) to 2011. I counted how many miles each team traveled and also the number of miles traveled on trips taken without a travel day (i.e., back-to-back games). Since this no-off day travel should be especially grueling. Here are the results averaged over the seven years, thanks to retrosheet for the data:

Team	Miles	BTB Miles
Milwaukee	25,341	16,513
Cincinnati	26,050	18,375
Chicago (N)	26,394	18,835
St. Louis	26,490	19,230
Chicago (A)	26,589	17,387
Cleveland	27,962	18,340
Washington	28,175	19,091
Minnesota	28,323	20,169
Kansas City	28,730	19,676
Detroit	28,879	20,698
Atlanta	29,680	19,090
Pittsburgh	29,722	18,442
Philadelphia	30,352	20,096
Baltimore	30,457	21,248
New York (N)	31,214	19,201
Toronto	31,342	22,475
New York (A)	31,841	19,935
Colorado	32,054	19,912
Houston	32,641	20,352
Arizona	34,366	19,563
Boston	34,474	21,505
Florida	36,003	20,626
Texas	37,229	22,305
Tampa Bay	37,998	22,621
Los Angeles (N)	38,084	17,471
San Diego	39,314	18,550
San Francisco	39,713	19,042
Los Angeles (A)	46,570	22,423
Oakland	46,659	20,829
Seattle	49,007	23,970

The ordering of the list is not terribly surprising. Teams in the center of the country, and center of their division, have the least travel. While those at the extremes of the country or their division have the most. Also since the NL Central plays the most intra-division games and the AL West the fewest, they are well represented at the top and bottom, respectively, of the list. There is a fair bit of spread, with Seattle traveling almost twice as much as Milwaukee. And the three west-coast AL West teams all travel nearly 7,000 miles more than the next team.

Finally I thought it would be cool to see what one season’s worth of travel looks like for a MLB team. For comparison here are travel maps for the 2011 teams with most and fewest miles traveled: the Seattle Mariners¹ and Cincinnati Reds (though the Brewers had the least travel averaged over the seven years the Reds had the least in 2011).

Craig Robinson made similar — and much better looking — maps comparing travel of the 2009, 1959 and 1886 Kansas City Royals/Athletics/Cowboys. My maps were made with the help of Nathan Yau’s great circle tutorial. Line thickness denotes number of trips.

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1. I used the actual travel not scheduled travel, with the Mariners playing in Seattle this past weekend for an ‘away’ series against the Florida Marlins. The Mariner’s league leading travel was reduced slightly — though they still came out on top. They went from Washington D.C. to Seattle and will stay in Seattle for their next series, 2,325 miles, rather than 3,633 miles going Washington D.C to Miami to Seattle. Florida gained travel distance going from Miami to Seattle (instead of staying in Miami) to Oakland for a total of 3,400 miles rather than 2,570. (Return to place in text)